God and the Unconscious

If there were an agent, a participant in your life, who knew every action you performed, and every idea you thought; who could bring about your success or failure; who cared about you, even loved you; whom you loved and respected deeply, or at least you knew you should; who never communicated with you directly, but whose messages you could receive and interpret in dreams; whose ways were mysterious to you; and whom you could petition mentally, often successfully, what would you call that agent? A deity? A demon? Or your own unconscious?

Whichever you might choose to call Her/Him/It, you would be right. As Carl Jung said, internal or external, it really doesn’t matter. It makes no difference at all. Consider this: Your unconscious is completely inaccessible to you (else it wouldn’t be your unconscious); you believe in its existence only because authorities in psychology have convinced you to, because you have no direct knowledge of it. Year by year scientists are discovering more and more intelligence in your unconscious that you cannot access—sometimes quirky, sometimes genius. Your unconscious possesses qualities that could have been ascribed only to God in generations past. The ancients, for example, believed that innovative ideas came from a goddess, or a muse. Today we ascribe our creativity to a secret part of our minds. Either way, we can’t talk directly to the source of our ideas. We have to beg and tease and cater to Her whims.

Whether Her accomplishments are the work of an Unconscious operating in my head or a God in another dimension no longer concerns me. It’s about semantic fashion as much as any notion of what’s “true.” Once called God; now called the Unconscious, it’s our support, our strength, our hidden reality. Experientially, God and the Unconscious are in the same category: influential power that exists outside our direct perception.  I want to call Him “God” instead of “the Unconscious” because saying “the Unconscious” all the time is awkward and “God” is easier to type.  And sounds nicer, more personal.

I may have, by now, offended both believers and atheists. But think a little more. None of the qualities you love about God are threatened or changed if you allow someone else to call the same force in our lives by a different name: God, Yahweh, Shiva, Krishna, Allah, Christ, Jah, The Unconscious. Allowing us to call the same power by different names costs you nothing. We might talk about differences in policies, or creation myths, or proscriptions, but the idea of a God is something we all have in common. You cherish stories about your deity that are different from the stories cherished by other denominations, but a sensitive listener will hear the underlying truths that we all share. Those truths are just as meaningful when we interpret them in the context of the Unconscious. That notion is certainly not original with me.

If you’re still having trouble, read Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, or anything of Carl Jung’s that catches your fancy. And there are many other resources out there that address the idea.

And if you are still having trouble, or even angered, then perhaps you are not a monotheist after all. That's okay. You might find Spinoza's Ethics to provide an interesting, different view. 

Now to stretch the powers of God just a little beyond mere psychological explanation, please consider allowing Him the occasional miracle, in theory. This is not as great a stretch as you might imagine. The Unconscious wreaks wonders. To speak about it as if capable of outright miracles is not that unreasonable. Many do believe the Unconscious to be capable of miracles. And if we are using the term “God,” speaking about Him as performing paranormalities (I made that word up) is downright respectful.

You may fear this as the thin edge of the wedge, a sneaky way for me to get all religious and spooky, but I promise to keep my head. I just want to talk about God without stirring up narrow loyalties and animosities.

I am only just beginning.